These days, it is at least satisfying to see that, even if the world has not become a better place in the past decade, it has become a place I can predict better. Since my time living in the US during the 2010 midterm elections, I have spent a good amount of time warning people about the rise in anti-scientific belief and conspiracy theories in the US and their slow seizure of the public square.
Unfortunately, many on the political left seem to see identifying conspiracy theory and its wrongness as an end in itself, politically, a tactic for more comprehensively dismissing political movements that are gaining on us every day. As with other phenomena allied with Trumpism, progressive folks see empirical wrongness as some kind of Achilles Heel or sign of inevitable defeat, and therefore reassuring. An increasingly elitist, siloed and out-of-touch left rarely thinks to ask itself: “why are these movements succeeding?” or, more importantly, “what are people getting out of these movements?”
Fundamentally, people do not take on new beliefs or join new social movements if these movements do not meet needs that are not being met elsewhere. If we do not ask ourselves what false beliefs are being used for, we have little hope of competing against those beliefs and the movements that peddle them.
So, I thought I might use today’s post to think a little more creatively and compassionately about one of the movements out there whose teachings are not merely wrong but cause unnecessary deaths of children with some frequency. Unlike many movements that are astroturfed by corporate wealth, the “Anti-Vaxx” movement is the very opposite. Its adherents persist in their anti-childhood vaccination campaigns despite facing the opposition of Big Pharma, one of the most ruthless and powerful industry groups in the world today, bigger, scarier and more popular than Big Tobacco.
So, why is the Anti-Vaxx movement so popular and why are its adherents so willing to donate volunteer time?
The core of the Anti-Vaxx movement are parents of autistic children who believe that childhood vaccinations cause autism. Their activism is focused on convincing other parents not to vaccinate their children, thereby preventing them from developing this often-crippling neurological disability. Why would a group of cash-strapped parents, many already run ragged caring for disabled kids with negligible help from the state or their community, throw themselves into this work?
Exactly. What if this is not an obstacle to Anti-Vaxx activism but a reason for said activism?
One of the dominant feelings for the parents and guardians of autistic kids is one of powerlessness. No matter how hard they work, how much love they show, how many new or controversial treatments they try out, etc. they feel powerless over the child’s disability, in an endless process of triage in which, not just their child but their whole family suffers day in-day out.
They can attend support groups and talk about that feeling of powerlessness but it never goes away. They can commiserate with the other parents of autistic kids but such experiences of social solidarity and companionship, as often as not, serve to entrench those feelings of powerlessness as one meets parents who have been struggling with non-verbal or non-responsive kids into young adulthood, with no sign of improvement on the horizon.
The perpetrators carefully planned their attack over time. cheapest cialis devensec.com But quitting can post great challenge, hence, most people need behavioral modification, medical attention and dental support. cialis tablets in india You need to consume Shilajit capsule along with NF Cure capsules. viagra 20mg cipla http://www.devensec.com/news/Devens_BOH_mosquito_WNV_public_notification_July_2018.pdf For the estimated 161,000 American men who will be diagnosed in the United States in the coming year, the number of sperm that reach the fallopian cialis cheap india tubes and subsequently increase the chance of fertilization.But let us imagine how different the experience would be if one could join a support group and, instead of sharing experiences of frustration and loss, the focus of the support group was to stop autism? Going to the support group would suddenly take on a very different character. Even if one’s own child could not be cured, the hope of an end to autism could be real, and one’s own loss could be balanced against achieving a greater social goal that would spare other parents from ever having to join such a group. That is what the Anti-Vaxx movement offers.
In many communities, seeing oneself as a victim or a member of a marginalized group requiring pity or accommodation is something shameful and plays to only certain kinds of personalities. Imagine an autism support group full of people whose primary self-image is not as victims but as heroes. Again, that is what the Anti-Vaxx movement can offer: a chance to create community with the parents in other families afflicted with autism based not on a shared victimhood but shared heroism.
In many smaller communities, there might not be a local autism support group but there might be a handful of Anti-Vaxxers. Furthermore, those who join the movement despite not having autistic kids but because they believe they have been screwed-over by Big Pharma in some other way, like survivors of benzodiazepine or opioid addiction are not just a source of camaraderie but people who can help lighten one’s burden as a caregiver in small, material ways.
So, let us be clear on some of the values that underpin the Anti-Vaxx movement: compassion, solidarity, camaraderie, heroism, altruism. In a neoliberal, individualistic society in which family support and help is becoming scarcer, people are coming together and offering each other not just material support and camaraderie but a psychological lifeline in the form a narrative of heroism for people struggling to put one foot in front of the other.
Another feature of communities brutalized by the pharmaceutical industry and of parents with negligible respite care and a school system that rations education assistants in school to the point where parents are routinely called to take their kid home when the SEA’s shift is over is the experience of being talked down-to by experts and authority figures.
Unlike the twentieth century, when we believed in Thomas Paine’s theory of common sense and people were allowed to explain science on the news, the twenty-first century is a time when the cult of expertise means that “it’s science; you wouldn’t understand,” is the stock response of the commissar class and the caring professions when questioned by lay people.
The Anti-Vaxx movement reverses this too. It believes, for better or worse, that anyone can read and figure out fairly advanced neuroscience; it has faith that if people “do their research,” they will come to the same conclusion, the very opposite of the movement responding to the climate crisis, which emphasizes expert authority and is deeply distrustful of any public debate of science. Furthermore, the movement gives its members the confidence to talk back to experts and authority figures, to stand their ground, to act like heroes and to proclaim a hope for a better world in the future.
If these folks weren’t killing all those kids, I might well join up!
For my earlier writing on autism, there is this post.
